Scam: GIZA ICO walks off after making $2 Million after ICO

Cryptocurrency scammers did a scam exit with more than $2 million after ditching their investors.

A bad actor or actors used a fake LinkedIn profile and copied pictures from another user’s Instagram to create a false persona — and successfully drew more than 1,000 investors into the ICO project, which was called Giza.

Investors who spoke to CNBC all described a common experience with the ICO in question: They thought the project was legitimate until warning signs began to appear, including a falling out with the company’s sole supplier, a lack of correspondence from its supposed founders, and failed attempts to recoup the lost funds.

The apparently well-orchestrated scam centers around a mysterious individual called Marco Fike, the COO of Giza. Among the eight investors, partners and former employees of Giza interviewed by CNBC, all claim they have never seen Marco Fike’s face.

The ICO was for a supposed start-up called Giza, which claimed to be developing a super-secure device that would allow people to store cryptocurrencies.

It carried out its ICO in January and drew investors for several weeks after. One person who put money into the project told CNBC that they invested ether that was equivalent to $10,000 at the time, and another said they had put in around $5,000 worth of ether.

At the beginning of February, Giza had raised and was holding more than 2,100 ethereum coins, which at the time were worth around $2.4 million. All but $16 worth of those ethereum coins are now missing.